Retreat Journal: 2014

Senior Class Retreat:

Our senior class is a nostalgic one. We always seem to find ourselves reminiscing about the past. Most of my favorite high school memories come from our retreats, more specifically the times on those trips when we would all hang out at the end of the day.

During our sophomore year, we went to Ashland, Ore. I loved walking around town, popping into little shops and taking silly pictures with my classmates. At Silver Falls, our junior retreat, my favorite memories involve the nightly sing-a-longs in the cabin and intense games of Apples to Apples. On our summer retreat, my classmates and I crammed into two booths in a greasy, beachside diner.

For our fall retreat, the seniors stayed home to work on our college applications. It began with a trip to Beesaw’s for breakfast. At most high schools, a class doesn’t go out for breakfast together. We were all able to sit at one big table and laugh and talk together about our favorite breakfast foods, how we like our coffee and the best restaurants in Portland.

I sat across from registrar Julia Cain, and next to Elayna Caron, a senior. The three of us laughed as we looked at the extensive menu, wanting to order one of everything. At that moment it didn’t seem like we were having breakfast with our college counselor, instead she seemed like a close friend. At the other end of the table Paul Martone, English teacher, and other seniors traded opinions on music and movies. When we left the restaurant, I told Elayna that I was glad our table was outside and isolated from the rest of the customers. After all, we were a loud group of teenagers. On our way out the door all of the wait staff wished us good luck on our senior year.

There is a part of me that wants to say that I enjoyed our “at-home” retreat the most because there were more bonding moments.

We gathered around the giant table in the library, sharing stories from past retreats and the last four years spent together. It was a weird mix of reminiscing about the past while working on college applications that will help determine our future. There was an overwhelming feeling of support in the library, clapping when someone would finish an application and helping each other answer personal statements questions.

On the last day of the retreat, the mood in the library could be described as sentimental. We would all be leaving Northwest Academy next year, only seeing each other at holidays and in the summer. It was apparent from the last day of the retreat that it’s going to be hard to find another support system like the senior class here. There are some classmates that I have only known for a year and others that I have gone to school with since sixth grade, but not seeing each other everyday is going to be so strange. I’m so excited to take the next step and go to college, but I’ll miss all of the memories my classmates and I have made together. – Molly Meier

Junior Class Retreat:

The sun has set and the shadows have receded into pure darkness. The only light resonates from the toasty fire sitting in front of me. My classmates surround me, and I can barely see their faces in the warm light of the fire. Jacob Alberts is standing next to me, telling a scary story. As I look around the circle surrounding the fire, I can see a flicker of fear in everyone’s eyes as they try to assure themselves the story is not true.

“BOO!” Richy Swinford says.

A ripple of screams flows through us. Slowly it turns to laughter as everyone realizes it’s just Richy.

Doug Cornett, my English teacher, slowly calms us down and begins to talk. There is absolute silence as every eye in that circle is trained on his face. Cornett talks about life, and how we should try to enjoy every moment of it. He jokingly quotes one of his favorite philosophers, Ferris Bueller, when he says:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once and a while, you could miss it.”

As Cornett finishes, his thoughts, he lets Erin Calkins, my Pre-Calculus teacher, speak.

She reinforces what Cornett had been previously telling us through a story of her own.

We sit there for a little bit in silence.

The faint chirp of crickets can be heard. I lay back and look at the starry night sky. There is almost no light pollution. I can see the thousands of little twinkling stars making up the Milky Way galaxy. It is beautiful.

I am in the moment. Not thinking about what has happened, or what is to come but what is happening right now in front of me. I think to myself, will I ever have another chance to sit around a campfire with all my friends like this?

It was then that I make a promise to myself: I will cherish every moment of every day that I live. I begin to realize how limited our time is on this earth, and I want to spend all of that time happy. This is how I feel in the moment.

Everyone almost simultaneously stands up. As they leave to go and brush their teeth or get a drink of water before going to bed. I watch and think: these are my friends, this is my community, and this is my home. – Jack Brebner
——
On the retreat, I had a moment of true terror, which might not be what you want to hear when you hear about a school trip. However, let me tell you something. It was wonderful.

I was in the middle of the forest, alone, walking in near silence. I spent the last 20 minutes hearing only random birds and the gravel under my feet. I was about a half-mile ahead of everyone on the trail. I took a step over a hill and I felt like I could hear a group of people ahead of me. They sounded like a loud tour group of people, but as I got closer the noise of feet turned into water. I stumbled upon Winter Falls, one of the waterfalls that only runs during the winter. At the time, in mid-September, it was just a trickle of water, but the trickle of water seemed more important than just the seasonal significance. I had just spent the last two hours engulfed in nature trying to find the beauty, and looking at that slow drip I found the purpose of planning a day-long hike on a three day-long retreat. I sat their for a few minutes just looking at the water. Eventually I stood up and started walking. It took another 20 minutes before the incident happened.

The walk was uphill on rocky terrain, so it was slow. Then I heard a voice. I had been in almost complete silence for almost an hour now, thus hearing this voice was like a sudden shock, like jumping into a cold pool after being in the hot tub. Despite the mundane nature of the voice and the words, I will never forget the phrase, “Did you lock your car?” It may sound stupid and it most likely is, but the sudden jolt from being submerged in nature then violently dragged out by the high pitch voice has stayed with me ever since.

As you walk through nature you absorb this feeling into yourself. You breathe in clean air. You feel that moist fresh condensation on your face, and the rocks and mud beneath your feet. I don’t know how but you feel better. Like waking up after a deep refreshing sleep, but this process happens slowly. It takes an hour or more to “get into” nature. Normally, we never get fully into nature either because there is someone with us or we pass other hikers. We distract ourselves with others, but I had been alone for more than 40 minutes at this point and I had barely even realized that just beyond the tree within eyesight in front of me there was a blue car and two women standing there, looking over the edge of the stone platform.

My first steps into the parking lot were only half a minute after hearing the voice. I was still disoriented, not stumbling but walking unconsciously walking towards the end of the path. I stopped for a second to look at the map, then I continued on my way. The last 15 minutes of the hike felt so much longer than the first two hours. I kept reliving the experience over and over again. I relived that experience for the rest of the hike, and I’m still reliving it now. – Richy Swinford

Sophomore Class Retreat:

During the three days at Camp Collins, many of the 27 members of the sophomore class shared my Nikon D5100 digital camera. They took 780 pictures of faces, trees, food and everything in between. These are some of my favorites:

John Elliott, a fellow sophomore, and I would start tetherball games, playing as hard as we could against each other. Elliott, who has at least 3-inches on me, would hit the ball so hard that I was too scared to even touch it. Eventually I got up the courage, and threw my whole body at the oncoming ball. When the ball hit me, I felt like I had broken a rib. I collapsed to the ground. I looked up and saw that Elliott was still hitting the ball, about to win, so I got up to finish the game. I lost. I crawled over to the table and grabbed my camera. The last picture taken was the yellow tether ball slamming into my side, throwing me through the air.

During the retreat, Henry Sullivan and Bernard Cohen, two more of my classmates, began a sort of dynamic duo of bad puns and insulting jokes. I rode with them on the way there, forced to listen to an hour of puns. From the moment the engine started to the moment I finally scrambled out of the car, it was one bad joke after another. I got out my camera and started looking around for something to photograph. Lo and behold, without missing a stride, Bernard was playing his ukulele and Henry was standing next to him pointing, continuing to joke around. That moment set the mood for our late night conversations that we had before turning off the lights.

The last half hour of the retreat, Jada Pierce, David Berkson and Wade Willis herded us into the amphitheater where we held the camp fire. They told us we were going to have a few people perform their monologues from Hamlet and get feedback from the acting teachers who had accompanied us on the trip. I was thinking that this was the worst way that they could possibly end such a great retreat. I sat on the bench and prepared to take a nap until the monologues were done. Then, Sushruta Chandramouli got up on the stage and began reciting his monologue. I honestly wasn’t expecting much, but when he started performing, something about being out in the forest, surrounded by my friends and hearing Sushruta recite lines from Hamlet, made for the best possible ending for the retreat. – Sam Crispin

Freshman Class Retreat:

We were at Café Mundo in Newport, Ore. It was oddly warm, and the guys and I were huddled on the 2nd floor patio, anxiously awaiting the Scotland independence vote. As the girls sitting with us began to grow annoyed with our speculation and criticism over the journalism coverage, we decided we wanted to take a walk.

My classmate, Nate Matusow, jokingly chastised me for inviting half the grade, sarcastically mocking that he wanted it to just be the “cool kids.” We are by no means the cool kids. We made our way to the street. We stopped at an unmarked crosswalk, and all crashed into each other, confused, as we realized no one is leading the pack or is incharge of a set direction. Nate, myself and a couple others walked as everyone followed, continuing our march towards the beach.

Meanwhile, we took turns checking our phones for results, poking fun at a survey that said 51% would vote to stay in the UK. We reached the beach and an unadulterated view of an impossibly gorgeous sunset. Many of us just stopped to stare.

As I looked ahead, I saw the beach was about 250 feet down, an almost straight cliff covered in sand dune grass. Ahead of us, others ran past a sculpture, down the beginning of a path, past a different tower sculpture, around a bend after crossing a pedestrian-roundabout then down the path that snaked steeply down the cliff. The angle of the path was much more than 45 degrees, incredibly steep and long, to account for the large different between the shore and top.

Accompanied by a couple others, we looked down to see our comrades already running about on the beach. I was now thinking our chaperone, Robbie Carver, would tell us not to go down, not wanting to get ourselves (and subsequently the cars that would drive us back to Beverly Beach State Park where we were staying) filled with sand. He didn’t say anything other than a small demand that we don’t get wet, even though most of us were already half way to the water and probably couldn’t hear him.

As I made my way to the rock pile just at the lip of the ocean, I took pictures of the breath-taking, almost unrealistic Oregon September sunset. We all started taking turns climbing the giant boulder at the center of the pile.

After a moment of walking around, Robbie finally arrived at the waters edge and had us all turn around to take a photo. After everyone got steady and in position on the rocks, he took a couple of pictures, but then said we are only going to be a silhouette because of the sunset, so we need to make our figures big and raise our arms. We did. I will always remember standing there with my friends who I have known for a while, and those I would get to know, beneath the orange sun melting into ocean. The moment is now forever immortalized in those photos and that memory.

After he took the photo, water rushed around the rock pile and engulfed the sand in between the rocks. Robbie said, “I told you not to get wet!” Which I interpreted as a joke, since he distracted us and had us turn our backs to the fast approaching ankle-deep water.

After I took a couple more photos and spent another 30 minutes on the beach, just watching everyone else and embracing the general romantic-ness of the moment, Robbie told us to start walking up the beach, back towards the path. I realized I had not checked my phone to see if there were any election results, being too enthralled with the beauty of the moment.

I heard someone say as we began the walk back: “This is perfect.” – Xavier D. Stickler